A Matter Of Time
by Osaru Sensei
Summary: A hunter has been employed by Dead Orbit to test some armour upgrades. What will she uncover, and at what cost?


**Time to switch fandom from RWBY to Destiny, yeah? This is but a prologue to my main Hunter story, called** ** _Hunter's Moon_** **. (Out Soon™!) It's basically just going to be my Hunter's story through the single-player campaign, with some embellishment here and there for epic flavour.**

* * *

The first thing she saw was a bright, white light filling her view. As her eyesight improved, she realised that she was lying on a stretcher in a cavernous room lined with bright lamps.

"There is no need to panic, you are amongst friends..." The sudden voice made the armour-clad woman twitch in surprise. She pivoted her head up towards where the voice was coming from. An old Awoken woman was walking up towards the stretcher. Her shoulder-length grey hair bobbed with every step, dashes of maroon hinting at their former lustre. Her golden eyes were scanning the woman in front of her with a saddened look.

"I do apologise for having to kill you earlier… you had a bad reaction to the experimental armour we gave you, and nothing we did seemed to stop you for long. I made the call to end it. Once again, I am terribly sorry."

"Who are you? What is this place, and what am I doing here?" The Awoken scientist had now arrived at the side of the stretcher, gently putting a hand on the woman's shoulder.

"I am Linea Solen, Arach of Dead Orbit and head of this facility. Here, we study Vex technology and how to turn it into an asset for humanity. _You_ are here as one of our testers, hunter. Come, there is much to show you…" The woman rose from her seat on the stretcher and followed Linea out the door.

"I don't understand a thing! You said you 'killed' me, but here I am still breathing and living. You also called me a… 'Hunter', was it? Why? What do I hunt?" Linea turned her head around as she walked, smiling fondly.

"You are a Hunter, a Guardian of the Last City. You can resurrect upon death with the aid of your Ghost." The woman looked at Linea with a dumbstruck expression.

"My… _ghost?_ "

"Technically not your ghost per se, as you weren't culled from the ancient dead like your fellow brothers and sisters. Rather, we… _donated_ … your mother's ghost as she has long since had her Final Death. Ah, here she comes now." A small, mechanical entity, something like a star, was floating down the corridor towards the pair at a leisurely pace.

"Welcome back to the land of the not-dead, Hunter. We will have so many adventures together, just like the old days…" As the Ghost floated closer, the Hunter held up a hand in surprise. As her fingers brushed the casing, something flashed in her mind.

* * *

 _A late night. A dark room. A blue light, floating off her shoulder onto a lynx, poised to strike..._

* * *

She yanked her hand back in shock.

"Something wrong, Hunter?" the little mech tilted its axis in worry as it observed her charge. The Hunter shook her head to free herself from the vivid images still glued to her retinas.

"No… I'm fine… just had some sort of… memory flash, I think." Linea tapped her chin with a finger as she contemplated.

"Your memories from before we had to… _subdue_ … you may possibly be reasserting themselves. Unlike your fellow Guardians you, as I said, were not resurrected for this job. As such, it's probable that your memory loss is not as… _permanent_ , as a 'true' Guardians."

The ghost hovered in place before it turned around and floated off down the corridor.

"Let's continue the tour, shall we?"

As they rounded a corner, they stepped out into an even bigger hall than the one the Hunter had woken in. What was on the other side of the large space made her hair stand on end as she slowly turned towards Linea with a horrified expression.

"Is it really safe with keeping a Vex time gate here? Aren't you afraid they'll come for you?"

"There is always that risk yes, but we're confident that that won't happen here. Up these stairs, please…" The Hunter cast one last, suspicious glance at the device before entering the door at the top of the stairs.

"We were testing some Vex tech upgrades for your armour when you went berserk." Linea walked up to a display case with a sand-coloured armour suspended inside.

"Would you be up for another test run? We won't force you if you say no."

"I'm just as curious as you about what happened. Let's do this." Linea reached up to pull out the cuirass, a red tube pulsing ominously on the underside of the chest plate.

"Now remember, this armour was upgraded with Vex tech, so there's no telling what you'll experience with prolonged exposure like this…"

"I'll be fine, Arach. Putting this armour back on is only the beginning, isn't it? You've got more plans for me."

"Actually… yes. That time gate? We want you to try and open it."

"Huh. Figures." As the Hunter put on the helmet with three lenses in a triangular pattern in the centre of the faceplate, she was assaulted with a myriad of different senses, all at once.

"YEOW! Bozhe moi, I think… I think I'm seeing several timelines simultaneously…" Linea tapped her lower lip in thought.

"Possible side-effect from the integrated Vex technology? Or a legitimate requirement to operate their tools?" As the Hunter stumbled around trying to get her sensory input down to a more human-capable level, she accidentally banged into a metal table, sending a canister over the edge and hurtling towards the floor. In one swift motion, she swung her free hand down to catch it.

* * *

 _She aimed her bow, its purple glow filling her with a calm serenity in stark contrast to the seething anger she felt for the large Eliksini captain standing in front of her, daring to laugh at her. She let her Void arrow fly, and it impacted the captain in the chest, only to tether his minions to him with strong, glowing void tethers. As she pulled back her bow for yet another tether, the large dreg in front of her laughed at the little girl's feeble attempts to defend her dying parents as yet another wooden arrow whizzed by over his shoulder..._

* * *

"… Another memory?"

"Yeah. Not a pleasant one, either." The Hunter hefted the metal canister in her hand as she rose from her squatting position.

"What's in these canisters?" Linea's face grew dark with sorrow.

"The elemental energy of fallen Guardians under the Dead Orbit banner."

"Oh." The Hunter bowed her helmeted head in reverence.

"It is stored here in case a Guardian needs an infusion of energy. I would say you most certainly qualify."

"You don't mind?"

"No. Go ahead." The Hunter selected three canisters with different content, and proceeded to one by one pour out the content in her hand and absorbing it before moving on to the next.

Her mother had taught her all about the different Hunter disciplines; the destructive Solar energy of the Gunslinger's Golden Gun; the lightning-swift energy of the Bladedancer's Arc Blade; and her personal favourite – the all-consuming energies of the Nightstalker's Void Bow. She would put this knowledge to use.

She was roused from her thoughts by Arach Linea.

"If it wouldn't be too much trouble, we would be honoured if you would don your mother's cloak and undertake this quest in the name of Dead Orbit…"

"There is no need to even ask. The honour would be mine." As the Arach's assistants started on their way to fetch the cloak, the Hunter raised a hand to halt them.

"Before you go, could you find me some vermilion paint? I need to do something I should've done a long time ago…" the assistants nodded and went on their way, returning after half an hour with a black, hooded cape with frills around the neck and a large, white Dead Orbit logo painted on the back. Attaching the cape, the Hunter removed her right glove and stuck two fingers into the small glass jar of vermilion paint. Putting her fingers up to her helmet, she drew a diagonal cut from top right to bottom left over her visual input array. _For you, mother…_

"Now then, we've got all ceremonial hubbub out of the way, I say we get going with our mission here! Ghost, I might need someone to keep check on my visual input with all this new tech in my helmet, so I'm going to need you to ride along with me." The Black and white little drone floated up obediently by her new master's head and de-materialised.

"I take it I'll be all by my lonesome down there by the gate?"

Arach Linea merely nodded as answer.

As the Hunter walked up towards the gate a few minutes later, she felt awe as she looked upon the suddenly much larger archway. She spared a moment to look back up to the control room where scientists were running all over each other to collect data. She turned her attention back to the gate as she cautiously held out a hand into thin air. No. Not thin air. It felt like… water? Suddenly the gate came to life, a humming noise filling the Hunter's ears, growing louder every second.

The last thing she saw was a bright, white light filing her view.

* * *

 **AN: Wow. Oh… Uh, yeah. That was a thing. Ended up being like, three times the intended length of my original idea.**

 **You guys confused yet? All will be answered in a timely (Hah! I pun!) fashion.**

 **I do not own Destiny, that's Bungie Studios and ActiVision.**


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